Qara Khitai Views

• General Goods

2What this short and somewhat impressionistic study, deriving mainly from my own work on the Qara Khitai, would like to stress, is that in order to write a fuller history of the Qarakhanids, one must also take into account the Chinese sources for Qarakhanid history, both literary and archaeological. Moreover, taking into account the eastern and western sources can also illuminate an important, albeit frequently neglected, aspect of Qarakhanid history, namely their role in the Silk Road trade and in their contemporary world system.

12Certainly east-west contacts were more developed at the height of the Tang or under the Mongol world empire. Yet describing the tenth to twelfth centuries simply as a “time of decline,” contradicts at least two other oftenrepeated facts. The first is that the name Khitai (or Cathay), originating in the nomadic Khitans who ruled Mongolia, Manchuria and parts of north China for more than 200 years (907-1125), and flourished in Central Asia as the Qara Khitai for nearly a century afterwards, became the standard name for China in Russia, West Asia and Europe.31 The second, is that this same period was also a time of great Islamic expansion to the east, which led to the conversion of many Central Asian Turks, including of course the Qarakhanids.32 It is therefore clear that cross-cultural contacts continued during this period, and with quite a significant scope, though the political fragmentation and the nature of the sources make it more difficult to follow them closely.

13In order to reconstruct this “neglected Silk Road,” one has to combine information from both east and west, using literary and archaeological sources together. My own work on the Qara Khitai, that deals with the twelfth century, suggests that Jin and Song artifacts found their way to Balasaghun and Samarkand,33 and that Khitāirobes were highly appreciated among the Saljūqs and the Khwārizm shāhs.34 Qara Khitai wine, on the other hand, was warmly welcomed in Jin markets,35 and Muslim Balasaghuni merchants, as well as other Qara Khitai subjects, arrived at Jin markets, though not regularly.36 Most of the Qara Khitai eastern trade (and therefore also Qarakhanid trade) seems to have been conducted through the Tangut state,37 and Muslim traders from Bukhara, Khojand and Turkestan also conducted trade with Mongolia.38

14The Khitan Liao dynasty, the forefathers of the Qara Khitai, probably played a prominent role in the Silk Road trade of the tenth to early-twelfth centuries. Although there are Chinese studies on the Khitans’ role in the Silk Road,39 the reconstruction of Central Asian trade with China in this period could benefit greatly not only from taking into account the remains in Xinjiang, but also from a fuller use of the vast materials from the Liao tombs, a significant number of which have been excavated in the last decades in north China.40 The rich findings of the Liao tombs include several artifacts of Muslim origin. A first attempt to exploit this material is Ma Wenkuan’s article, which focuses on Islamic glass vessels found in Liao tombs and pagodas, and concludes that they reached the Liao through the Qarakhanids.41